I was loading my motherboard cd to install my drivers and in the middle of the instal the computer restarted. Now the computer will not recognise that the disk drive is even there. the cd drive had power b/c when you put a cd in the light comes on. but it wont load and if you go into my computer it doesnt show the drive at all. however if i change in the bios to load from cd it will load my windows disk. i just cant get it to load anything from windows. any ideas?

What other things/peripherals/hardware is installed on this computer? Do you have another CD/DVD drive, USB or Firewire connected external drives, secondary hard disk? I'm thinking specifically of things that get a drive letter mapped to them here if you follow me.

I don't know if this applies to your case in particular but I have seen where, on a computer which has numerous devices and which gets upgraded with something else, sometimes the devices are in contention for a specific drive letter and you 'lose' a device that was working fine before.

If I'm right you should be able to go into the Computer Management console (right-click on your My Computer icon and choose Manage...) and resolve it by going into Storage and then Disk Management and then right-clicking what's currently using D: or E: (or whatever the CD-Rom used to be labeled) and "Changing Drive Letter or Path" to something on down the line. Then reboot and see if you old CD-Rom doesn't come back.

WARNING! You don't want to change a drive letter haphazardly! Don't even think about changing the C: drive. But your Zip drive doesn't necessarily care if it's the D: E: F: or G: drive for example.

Ok i got as far as to figure out the problem but i cant seem to fix it. the computer tells me there is an error and to uninstal the driver and then to reinstall. when i reinstall it tells me there is an error found in hardware installation. its a samsung cdr/rw sw-525S.
I tried to download the drivers from the internet but i dont know where to get them. the ones they had on the samsung website i couldnt get to load on my computer.

Be sure that you have completely uninstalled it first and do this through System Properties - Hardware - Device Manager.

SW-252 ? (instead of 525?)

A quick check of the Samsung website found a model with the name SW-252 which is a R/RW optical disk drive (ODD). There is a firmware update and a user guide (recommended reading); it says that specific drivers aren't needed for Windows XP but if you have the CD which came with it you can use it to get drivers from.

Just take it slow and reboot between uninstalling the device and attempting to reinstall.